ADAMS 2000.pdf

Journal of the History of Biology 33: 457491, 2000. 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 457

Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J. B. S. Haldane

MARK B. ADAMSHistory and Sociology of ScienceUniversity of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia, PA 19104-6310, U.S.A.E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane by focusingon an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927, The Last Judgment thesequel to his better known work, Daedalus (1924). This astonishing essay expresses a visionof the human future over the next 40,000,000 years, one that revises and updates Wellsianfuturism with the long range implications of the new biology for human destiny. That visionserved as a kind of lifelong credo, one that infused and informed his diverse scientific work,political activities, and popular writing, and that gave unity and coherence to his remarkablecareer.

Keywords: J. B. S. Haldane, biology, politics, genetics, evolution, population genetics,physiology, Darwinism, experimental biology, eugenics, Britain, Russia, India, Soviet,Communism, socialism, philosophy, vision, literature, popularization, religion, humanexperimentation, bioethics, Venus, Mars, science fiction, technocracy, futurology, H. G. Wells,Julian Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, C. S. Lewis

The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is theservant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason hasbecome the greatest and most terrible of the passions.

J. B. S. Haldane1

Introduction

J. B. S. Haldane (18921964) is one of the most fascinating, perplexing andtroublesome figures in the history of science. That he was a major biologist ofhis time goes without saying, but attempts at further scientific classificationare futile: there is hardly a field of modern biology in whose history he doesnot deserve at least some mention. And, beyond biology proper, Haldane hadyet other personae that at times seemed no less central to his career. Anyattempt to come to terms with his life and work must face the dual challengeof his extraordinary multiformity and his utter singularity.

1 Haldane, 1924, p. 78.

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I first heard his name as an undergraduate more than thirty-five years ago but I have been bumping into JBS ever since. When I began my studies ofthe Russian population geneticist Sergei Chetverikov, there was that famoustroika of Haldane, Fisher, and Wright who created mathematical popula-tion genetics in the 1920s and early 1930s.2 Later, I became absorbed in thepostwar history of Lysenkoism, and discovered that Haldane was one of thefew Western biologists who rose to Lysenkos defense.3 While exploring A.I. Oparins theory of the origin of life, I was surprised to learn that the co-originator of that theory (in 1929) was none other than JBS.4 My intereststurned to issues of scientific planning and there was Haldane again, thistime as a central member of the visible college of British activist scientistsin the 1930s.5 In the early 1970s, when I interviewed Theodosius Dobzhanskyabout his life, he suddenly began to recount his own memorable encounterswith JBS, commenting, Haldane was always recognized as a singular case.6Later, I began to study the history of eugenics only to find that Haldanewas one of those so-called Bolshevik, reform eugenicists of the left.7Then, on to medical genetics in Russia and there was Haldane the humangeneticist, who apparently thought little of the Russian work, preferring thatof his own student, Lionel Penrose.8 No matter how distantly I ranged, heproved impossible to avoid: even while teaching a literature class on thathoary classic, Brave New World (1932), there was Haldanes Daedalus ofnine years earlier, where the idea of ectogenesis (on which the novel isbased) and the word itself came from.9 And, as a quick survey of theliterature reveals, he had numerous other personae as well the physiologist,the biochemist, the biochemical geneticist, the statistician, the popularizer,the essayist, the polemicist, the editor, the politician, the Communist, themigr to India.10

Could all these Haldanes really be the same person? Jack to his friends,Prof to his students, JBS to the world who was this man? He was,I learned, the most erudite biologist of his generation, and perhaps of thecentury11 (to quote Michael White), a polymath (as Ernst Mayr describes

2 Adams, 1968; on Haldanes contribution, see Provine, 1971, pp. 167177.3 See, for example: Filner, 1977; Paul, 1983a; Krementsov, 1996.4 Adams, 1990a, pp. 695700; see also Bernal, 1967; Farley, 1974.5 Werskey, 1971.6 One of these encounters has been detailed by his daughter (Coe, 1994, p. 25).7 Adams, 1990b. On Haldane and eugenics, see especially: Paul, 1983b and 1998; Kevles,

1985; Mazumdar, 1992, pp. 146195.8 See Kevles, 1985, especially pp. 148164.9 Thankfully this 1924 work has recently been republished (Dronamraju, 1995, pp. 2350).

10 In addition to already cited sources, see Clark, 1968; Dronamraju, 1968 and 1985.11 White, 1965, pp. 17; in Filner, 1977, p. 309.

HALDANES VISIONARY BIOLOGY 459

him),12 of whom one student said, He seemed to be the last man who mightknow all there was to be known.13 Here was a person for whom the twocultures of C. P. Snow apparently had no meaning, who routinely pepperedhis writing with Greek, Latin, and French poetry (without translation) notto mention Sanskrit and Old Norse. He was in the habit of conducting humanexperiments many of them dangerous on himself. And his appearance andpersonality always seemed to leave an indelible impression: a giant bear ofa man with bushy eyebrows, alternatively charming and irascible, a feisty,outrageous in-your-face rhetorician who loved a good argument in short(in the apt phrase of an American reporter) a cuddly cactus.14 This is nota man, declared Boris Ephrussi, but a force of nature.15

Even a cursory survey of his life, however, reveals tantalizing paradoxes,puzzles, and contradictions. Although himself a member of the British elite,JBS enjoyed ridiculing it outrageously. He learned his science by apprenticingwith his distinguished physiologist father, John Scott Haldane, of whom healways spoke highly; but he spent his entire career confounding his fathersreligious, anti-materialist philosophy. From his earliest days, he was set ona career in science but he never took any degree in the subject, earninghis First at Oxford in the classics (Greats, or Literae Humaniores).At the time he launched the series of famous papers that would help createmathematical population genetics, he was actually employed as a reader inbiochemistry.16 The same JBS who supported a eugenic project in the 1930swith words, money, and his own semen17 would repeatedly point out howpremature such efforts were, given the current state of knowledge. The manwho complained in 1933 that University College was as full of bloodyCommunists as Cambridge18 would become a member of that partys Britishpolitburo within the decade. Haldane enjoyed declaring that his favoriteMarx was Groucho (and regaling doubting listeners with the punch lines toprove it),19 but, a mere five years later, he would author one of the mostcompelling books ever published in English arguing for Marxist science.20He was also an impassioned and consistent defender of the freedom of

12 Mayr, 1995, p. 79.13 Clark, 1968, p. 86.14

The Cuddly Cactus, 1956, p. 7.15 Ephrussis phrasing was: Ce nest pas un homme, cest une force de la Nature. See

White, 1965; from Clark, 1968, p. 99.16 He worked for ten years at Cambridge as second-in-command to Gowland Hopkins,

biochemist, future president of the Royal Society and Nobel laureate.17 Paul, 1983b, p. 31.18 Clark, 1968, p. 97.19 Clark, 1968, p. 97.20 Haldane, 1938.

460 MARK B. ADAMS

science but would remain conspicuously silent when his Soviet geneti-cist colleagues were fired from their jobs, even when it became known thatNikolai Vavilov, his favorite Russian geneticist, had died in prison.21 In1957, JBS announced to the world that he was relocating to India in order toprotest British involvement in the Suez War but he had already accepted apost there and made plans to leave before that war broke out. Finally, althoughhe made major contributions to at least eight fields of science, it appears thatHaldane achieved no single great or outstanding discovery.22

Many sources attest to Haldanes striking multiformity and puzzlingcontradictions, but few attempt to explain what, if anything, unified his manyfacets. The various subplots of his life unfold in the secondary literaturealmost dialectically he joins the Party and breaks with it; defends Lysen-koism, or perhaps not; endorses eugenics, but undermines it; and so forth.The best scientific biography of Haldane tries to use scientific Marxism asa unifying theme, but can only do so by conflating socialism, Marxism,Communism, and positive impressions of the Soviet experiment.23 Eventhe admirable and painstaking 300page biography by Ronald Clark whichdetails JBSs personal intrigues and administrative hassles but largely ignoreshis science and ideas does not satisfy, for these and other reasons notedby its reviewers, leaving the impression that there is something missing.24Despite all the myriad references to JBS, he seems to have been, as JohnBeatty rightly notes, historically neglected.25

In this essay, I attempt to identify the underlying vision that united thisapparent chaos of contradictions, these many personae, into a single whole. Ido so by highlighting a remarkable essay he published in 1927 one which,in many respects, completes and enriches the vision begun in Daedalus, butwhich, unlike it, has been almost totally ignored by historians. The essayis entitled The Last Judgment and it is, I think, the most influential andrevealing thing he ever wrote. Quite simply, I propose to introduce anddiscuss this essay, inquire as to its origins, and suggest how it can help usto see the coherence in JBSs extraordinary life and work.

21 In Haldanes various essays Vavilovs name appears, with praise, more than that of anyother Soviet scientist; Vavilov had orchestrated his membership in the U.S.S.R. Academy ofSciences, but, unlike other American and British biologists who were foreign members of thatacademy in 1948 and 1949, Haldane never resigned.

22 White, 1965; from Dronamraju, 1985, p. 68.23 Feldman, 1976. I am grateful for my many discussions with my good friend Feldman

during my year in Moscow (19761977) around the time his book came out. A Haldanesquecharacter himself, Feldman was a Party member, as well as a lover of Scotland and founderof a Soviet Bobbie Burns Society.

24 For example, see the essay review by Werskey, 1971, pp. 171183.25 Beatty, 1992, p. 181.


The Last Judgment

In the mid-1920s Haldane burst onto the scene with his full range of talents,rapidly becoming a major British figure in both science and letters. It washis work on genetics, biochemistry, physiology and especially mathematicalpopulation genetics that drew the attention of science; but it was his brilliantpopular essays that attracted the attention of the broader public.

Curiously, he apparently began the decade somewhat skeptical aboutwhether scientists should write popular articles; at one point, when one ofJulian Huxleys pieces in Nature was picked up by the Daily Mail (whichclaimed he had discovered the elixir of life), Jack warned him that hewas in danger of losing his standing as a reputable scientist and would endby being taken for a quack.26 It is unclear what led JBS to change his mind.The closest he came to explaining himself are a few remarks in a preface:Many scientific workers believe that they should confine their publica-tions to learned journals, he says (was he referring to his earlier self?),and then continues: . . . it seems to me vitally important that the scientificpoint of view should be applied, so far as is possible, to politics and reli-gion.27 Whatever the source of his reticence, he was soon over it: first cameDaedalus (1924), then his controversial defense of chemical warfare, Call-inicus (1925), and by 1927 he had published essays in a dizzying assortmentof periodicals, including not only The Daily Mail, but also The ManchesterGuardian, The Rationalist Annual, Bermondsey Book, The Nation, TheWorld To-Day, Graphic, Weekly Dispatch, and Modern Science in Britain,Haagsche Maandblad in Belgium, and Harpers Magazine, The Forum,Century Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic in the UnitedStates.

One reason for Haldanes apparent change of heart may have been thereaction to his essay Daedalus: Or, Science and the Future. Its publicationresulted from a talk he delivered to a club at Cambridge on February 4,1923: the audience happened to include a scout for a new series, Todayand Tomorrow, and a rewritten version of JBSs presentation was used tohelp launch it. In this essay Haldane suggests that the world can be savedthrough eugenic ectogenesis the in vitro fertilization and developmentof human eggs. He developed his ideas in a fictional format, concoctinga plausible college essay written by an undergraduate many years henceabout how these biological developments during the period 19501990 hadtransformed civilization: The small proportion of men and women who areselected as ancestors for the next generation are so undoubtedly superior to

26 J. Huxley, 1970, p. 126.27 Haldane, 1927a, p. v.

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the average that the advance in each generation in any single respect, from theincreased output of first-class music to the decreased convictions for theft,is very startling. Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubtthat civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to thegreater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost allcountries.28

The publication of Daedalus caused a sensation (it sold some 15,000copies its first year and was reprinted a dozen times) and elicited diverseand energetic responses. One of the most immediate, published the sameyear, was a sobering essay by Bertrand Russell (18721970) entitled Icarus,or the Future of Science,29 which raised considerable doubts as to whethergovernments or medical officials could be trusted with administering eugenicpolicies. (Eight years later, Russells reservations were given fictional formby Haldanes long-time acquaintance, Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave NewWorld, which portrayed a future global technocratic utopia built on universaleugenic ectogenesis.30) With the publication of Daedalus in the Today andTomorrow series, then, quite suddenly, JBS was as famous as his fatherand much in demand. There is no need to dwell further on Daedalus: itsinfluence has been discussed in a number of recent publications, and it hasbeen reprinted with retrospective commentaries by Joshua Lederberg, ErnstMayr, and others.31

What seems to have been overlooked, however, is that Daedalus wasbut the first of two essays laying out Haldanes broader vision. The second,published three years later, was entitled The Last Judgment. Indeed, the titleof the second essay comes straight from the first: Daedalus opens with twoscenes from Haldanes memory about the Great War the first, a battlefield;the second, a picture of three Europeans in India looking at a great new starin the milky way. In contemplating the origins of that cosmoclastic explo-sion, Haldane writes: Perhaps it was the last judgment of some inhabitedworld. . . . 32

The Last Judgment appeared as the final piece in Possible Worldsand Other Essays, issued in London by Chatto and Windus in 1927 andreprinted the following year.33 This remarkable collection of Haldanesessays the first of many fully embodied the wide range of interests at

28 Haldane, 1924, pp. 6667.29 Russell, 1924.30 A. Huxley, 1932.31 Dronamraju, 1995. See also Kevles, 1985, pp. 176192.32 Haldane, 1924, p. 3.33 Haldane, 1927a. The exact edition is important: this particular essay was omitted from

the books American edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928), as it had been publishedseparately in Harpers Magazine.


which later biographers would marvel. Among its thirty-five essays are hisrenowned obituary of William Bateson; his prolegomenon to the comingevolutionary synthesis (Darwinism To-Day); discussions of science andpolitics, eugenics, social reform and the funding of science; and memor-able popular science essays on a wide range of subjects, as well as severaldeclarations of his own fundamental beliefs, including When I am Dead,The Duty of Doubt, and The Future of Biology. The penultimate essay isthe volumes signature piece, Possible Worlds, which explores the animalmind and concludes with the likely ontology, aesthetics, and ethics of aphilosophical barnacle.34 In short, the volume itself embraces between twocovers the full range of Haldanes diverse facets, and, I would suggest, it isThe Last Judgment the volumes culmination and finale that presentsthe underlying vision that united them.

The Last Judgment is about the end of the world. The star on which welive had a beginning, the essay opens, and will doubtless have an end.After surveying accounts of the final days given in various religions andmyths (he is especially hard on Revelations), he settles, for the purposes ofhis tale, on the moon as the source of destruction, citing Islamic, Nordic andother myths which also give our satellite special prominence in the final days.With these preliminaries finished, Haldane sets upon his principle task todescribe the most probable end of our planet as it might appear to spectatorson another. I have been compelled to place the catastrophe within a periodof the future accessible to my imagination, he explains, for I can imaginewhat the human race will be like in forty million years, since forty millionyears ago our ancestors were certainly mammals, and probably quite defi-nitely recognizable as monkeys. But I cannot throw my imagination forwardfor ten times that period. Four hundred million years ago our ancestors werefish of a very primitive type. I cannot imagine a corresponding change inour descendants.35 Haldanes literary approach is to speed up the end byhypothesizing a series of circumstances that lead our moon to approach theearth and destroy all life.

The core of the essay is a fictional message from the future whichembodies his visionary ideas a seventeen-page broadcast to infants onthe planet Venus some forty million years hence. The message begins: Itis now certain that human life on the earths surface is extinct, and quiteprobable that no living thing whatever remains there. The following is a briefrecord of the events which led up to the destruction of the ancient home ofour species. From the outset, then, Haldane signals two arresting ideas: the

34 The passages concerning an intelligent barnacle left an indelible impression on theyoung John Maynard Smith; see his Introduction, in Haldane, 1985, p. ix.

35 Haldane, 1927d, p. 292.

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complete destruction of life on the earth is not the end; and the spectators onanother planet who view the earths destruction are, in fact, our descendants.

Haldanes message to Venusian infants devotes only a few paragraphsto the physical causes of the destruction of life on earth as they unfold over40,000,000 years. With the exhaustion of all fossil fuels, other sources aretried, including water, wind and sun, but they prove insufficient and unreli-able. Ultimately, the force of the tides is harnessed but over millionsof years, the use of tidal energy gradually slows the earths rotation. By8,000,000 the length of the day has doubled; the moon gradually movesfarther away, then begins its final approach, and it soon becomes clear thatthe end is coming. These events lead to massive climate changes, the diminu-tion of the human population, and the extinction of all non-domesticatedmammals, birds, and reptiles and many plant species. The coming destruc-tion, then, is a direct result of human action the continuing use of tidalforces to satisfy the great demand for energy but, even when the futureconsequences of this are clear, for many millions of years humanity doesnothing to alter the unfolding course of events.

Why this curious inaction? The fundamental cause, according to theVenusian message, was the quest for and achievement of individual humanhappiness. Initially, science is harnessed to gratify all human desires. Thedevelopment of synthetic food allows the population to grow. The continentsand climate are remodeled to suit human tastes. By the year five million, themessage tells us, the human race had reached equilibrium; it was perfectlyadjusted to its environment . . . ; and the individuals were happy, that is tosay, they lived in accordance with instincts which were gratified. . . . Humaneffort was chiefly devoted to the development of personal relationships andto art and music, that is to say, the production of objects, sounds, and patternsof events gratifying to the individual.

Of special moment is the triumph over natural selection. With the devel-opment of the biological sciences, humans achieve almost complete controlof life. Although they apply this knowledge to the sculpting of other lifeforms, the alteration of the human form is only minor, and largely directedat achieving happiness. Teeth are eliminated, along with all disease; thehealthy human lifespan is extended to three thousand years; and, since itis no longer needed, the human pain sense is almost completely abolished the most striking piece of artificial evolution accomplished, accordingto the message. Aside from these adjustments, however, the instinctive andtraditional preferences of the individual, which were still allowed to influencemating, caused a certain standard body form to be preserved, and largelyon aesthetic grounds the human form was not allowed to vary greatly: The


slow changes due to other causes were traced to their sources and preventedbefore very great effects had been produced.

As a consequence, by the year 5,000,000, natural selection had beenabolished and human evolution had ceased leading to millions of yearsof utopian stasis. Scientific discovery was largely a thing of the past, and theoccasional pursuit of mathematics or biology is undertaken with little or noregard for practical results. The one exception was the blending of scienceand art in the practice of horticulture: the effort expended on the evolutionof beautiful flowers would have served to alter the human race profoundly,the message comments, but evolution is a process more pleasant to directthan to undergo. As a consequence, by 25,000,000, when the end is only afew million years off, the vast majority of mankind contemplated the deathof their species with less aversion than their own, and no effective measureswere taken to forestall the approaching doom.

This inactivity is also centrally linked, according to the message, to thecurious human habit of being influenced by events in the past rather thanby an envisaged future. Humanity continued to squander energy becauseit was characteristic of the dwellers on earth that they never looked morethan a million years ahead: human religions all attached great significanceto past occurrences. This trait, the message suggests, had a biological basis:If our own minds dwell more readily on the future, Venusian infants aretold, it is due largely to education and daily propaganda, but partly to thepresence in our nuclei of genes such as H 149 and P 783 c, which determinecertain features of cerebral organization that had no analogy on earth.

Because of its inherent danger, and the considerable pleasures of theearthly utopia, few had been willing or interested to pursue space flight. Here,at least seen from todays perspective, Haldanes imagination appears to flag:his account of the difficulty of getting projectiles into space, the impossibilityof their landing, and so forth, leads him to anticipate that successful spacetravel would take more than a million years to effect beginning some eightmillion years into our future. Expeditions finally manage to reach Mars inthe year 9,723,841, but they are annihilated by the species dominant on thatplanet, which conducts its irrigation. At long last, after 284 failed attempts,a successful landing is made on Venus, but the expedition dies because of theinhospitable environment.

The impending doom, however, leads some to consider the colonizationof other planets. A small group of humans decide to forego earthly pleasuresin order to preserve human kind: they willingly undergo controlled humanevolution in order to create a race capable of inhabiting Venus.

A few hundred thousand of the human race, from some of whom we aredescended, determined that though men died, man should live forever. It

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was only possible for humanity to establish itself on Venus if it were ableto withstand the heat and want of oxygen there prevailing, and this couldonly be done by a deliberate evolution in that direction first accomplishedon earth. Enough was known of the causes responsible for evolution torender the experiment possible. The human material was selected in eachgeneration. All who were not willing were able to resign from participa-tion, and among those whose descendants were destined for the conquestof Venus a tradition and an inheritable psychological disposition grewup such as had not been known on earth for twenty-five million years.The psychological types which had been common among the saints andsoldiers of early history were revived. Confronted once more with an idealas high as that of religion, but more rational, a task as concrete as andinfinitely greater than that of the patriot, man became once more capableof self-transcendence.36

Unlike their self-centered brethren, those noble few who were once moreevolving, the message reminds us, were not happy: they were out of harmonywith their surroundings and once more subject to disease and crime, which,as much as heroism and martyrdom, are part of the price which must bepaid for evolution. The price is paid by the individual, Haldane remindsus, and the gain is to the race. . . . To our ancestors, fresh from the pursuitof individual happiness, the price must often have seemed too great, andin every generation many who have now left no descendants refused to payit.

After ten thousand years, a human race is artificially evolved requiringonly one-tenth the oxygen; raising the normal human body temperature takeslonger. But the planet has to be made to meet them halfway: before humanscan inhabit Venus it is necessary to transform the planet. This is accomplishedby flooding Venus with specially engineered bacteria designed to wipe out allVenusian life forms and render the planet more habitable. Once on Venus,the new settlers continue their modifications apace: So rapid was our evolu-tion, notes the message, that the crew of the last projectile to reach Venuswere incapable of fertile unions with our inhabitants, and they were thereforeused for experimental purposes. Well before the earths destruction, then,there are in effect two human species: the old one on earth, which, havingsuccessfully cultivated human happiness, will be destroyed by fire fromheaven; and a new, bioengineered humanity on Venus.

Thereafter, the new Venusian humanity settled down as members of asuper-organism with no limits to its possible progress. Before long, theevolution of the individual has been brought under complete social control,

36 Haldane, 1927d, p. 302.


and humans have undergone rapid controlled evolution, reacquiring the painsense and also a sensitivity to wave-lengths between 100 and 1200 meters,which places every individual at all moments of life, both asleep and awake,under the influence of the voice of the community. Safe on Venus, theseevolved humans escape the catastrophe on earth. But they do not stop there.Plans are underway to colonize Jupiter: A dwarf form of the human raceabout a tenth of our height, and with short stumpy legs but very thick bones,is therefore being bred. Their internal organs will also be very solidly built.They are selected by spinning them round in centrifuges which supply anartificial gravitational field, and destroy the less suitable members of eachgeneration. If Jupiter is successfully occupied, attempts will be made tocolonize Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, where it is possible that underthe conditions of life in the outer planets the human brain may alter in such away as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds.

For this new human race, untroubled by such self-regarding sentiments aspride and a personal preference concerning mating, even the eventual deathof the solar system need not limit its destiny:

About 250 million years hence our solar system will pass into a regionof space in which stars are far denser than in our present neighbourhood.Although not more than one in ten thousand is likely to possess planetssuitable for colonization, it is considered possible that we may pass nearenough to one so equipped to allow an attempt at landing. If by thattime the entire matter of the planets of our system is under consciouscontrol, the attempt will stand some chance of success. . . . Only a veryfew projectiles per million would arrive safely. But in such a case wasteof life is as inevitable as in the seeding of a plant or the discharge ofspermatozoa or pollen.

The ultimate goal is clearly stated: Our galaxy has a probable life of at leasteighty million million years. Before that time has elapsed it is our ideal thatall the matter in it available for life should be within the power of the heirsof the species whose original home has just been destroyed. . . . And there areother galaxies.

In an epilogue, Haldane concludes the essay by reinforcing the futureVenusian message in the present tense: Mans little world will end. Thehuman mind can already envisage that end. If humanity can enlarge the scopeof its will as it has enlarged the reach of its intellect, it will escape that end. Ifnot, the judgment will have gone out against it, and man and all his workswill perish eternally. Either the human race will prove that its destiny isin eternity and infinity, and that the value of the individual is negligible incomparison with that destiny, or the time will come When . . . earth is but a

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star, that once had shone. 37 Thus ends The Last Judgment, and PossibleWorlds.

What are we to make of this extraordinary essay? Three features are espe-cially worth noting. First, true to the volumes preface, Haldane has indeedapplied the scientific viewpoint to politics and especially religion. In effect,the opening references to religious myths are used to set the scene for analternative, science-based myth of our destiny. The end of the world, hesuggests, need not mean the end of humankind: ultimately, the last judg-ment is not something that a god or nature renders upon humanity, butrather something that, for the first time, humanity may well be able decidefor itself if it is willing to pay the price. A second striking feature ofthe essay is the time scale: human destiny, he argues, must be seen in thecontext of evolutionary, geological, and astronomical time, rather than in thepaltry, narrow context of our own written history. (The importance of usingthe right scale was a point he would make repeatedly in other essays aboutother subjects.38) Finally, we should note the compressed richness of ideas the physical mastery of the planet, the control of human evolution, thedestruction of the earth, the migration to Venus, the engineering of humansto suit it (and of it to suit humans), the emergence of a collective mind, thepending colonization of Jupiter.

Whatever we may make of it, the power of Haldanes vision foundgreat resonance among others of his generation. We have already noted thatHaldanes Daedalus led to Brave New World but the impact of his LastJudgment on futurology and literature was, if anything, greater and moreimmediate. That influence was principally felt through the works of OlafStapledon (18861950). In 1928, the forty-two-year-old philosopher had justcompleted A Theory of Modern Ethics and was considering another form forhis ideas, The Future Speaks. Then he read Possible Worlds, and it changedeverything: The Last Judgment became the inspiration and prototype forone of the most influential books of its decade, a work infused with Haldanesvision.

That work was Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future(1930), a philosophical pseudo-history of humanity from the world of 1930through to the end of a habitable solar system some two billion years hence.39In the course of this future history, civilizations rise and fall, humankind

37 The quotations are from Haldane, 1927d, pp. 292312.38 See, for example, Haldane, 1985.39 Stapledons classic was reissued by Pelican Books in 1937 and Penguin Books in 1963

and has also appeared, together with Starmaker, in a joint American edition (New York: Dover,1971); five of his principal novels were published in Stapledon, 1953, and all of them wereinfluenced, to varying degrees, by Haldane. For information on Stapledons life, see the tworecent biographies, both excellent (Fiedler, 1983; Crossley, 1994).


almost becomes extinct several times, and some eighteen distinct humanspecies succeed one another, eight of which are bioengineered by theirpredecessors. Stapledons Fifth Men undergo the events described in TheLast Judgment with remarkable precision. Indeed, as has been pointed out,Stapledon used many of Haldanes ideas as the basis for substantial episodes,including: the depletion of fossil fuels, the destruction of earth by a disinte-grating moon, the development of new human senses, the abolition of pain,eugenic manipulation, the transformation of Venus, and the bioengineering ofa dwarf humanity to colonize the outer planets.40

Understandably, Haldane read Stapledons classic and instantly recog-nized his own ideas, cast on a much grander and more detailed scale thathe welcomed. He was not so amenable to another book published in 1930,also based entirely on his own futurological ideas The World in 2030by Lord Birkenhead and wrote a stinging review pointing out the plagi-arism.41 By contrast, JBS initiated a friendly correspondence with Stapledon,offering free consultations on the authors next myth and an invitation to hisLondon laboratory; soon Stapledon would become an occasional member ofHaldanes intellectual coterie.42 In his introduction, Stapledon had charac-terized his book as not prophecy, but myth, or an essay in myth.43 InStapledon, no doubt, Haldane recognized a true disciple.

Largely through the works of Olaf Stapledon, Haldanes visionary ideasrapidly spread. This is not the place to explore the enormous influence ofHaldanes essay, however, as our concern is with understanding its author.44

Origins of the Vision

Where did the rich vision in Haldanes The Last Judgment come from?Today, finding the answer may seem a daunting task, given the multiplicity ofhis ideas; but every contemporary reader and reviewer knew precisely whathis primary source of inspiration had been: H. G. Wells.

40 See Sam Moskowitz, Olaf Stapledon: the Man Behind the Works, in Stapledon, 1979,pp. 3537; as cited in Crossley, 1994, pp. 190191.

41Lord Birkenhead Improves his Mind, originally published in Week-End Review in 1930,

reprinted in Haldane, 1946b, pp. 1317.42 Crossley, 1994, p. 91.43 Stapledon, 1953, p. 9.44 This essay is part of a much broader forthcoming study, Visionary Biology, which will

detail the mutual influences and interactions among a host of thinkers who shared manyelements of Haldanes worldview.

470 MARK B. ADAMS

Herbert George Wells (18661946) was a fin de sicle phenomenon.45Catapulted to fame by his turn-of-the-century scientific romances (18951905), which were translated into many languages, Wells rapidly became aninternational superstar as the inventor and head guru of futurology. Equally athome in scientific, social and humanistic discourse, he exercised an enormousinfluence over an entire intellectual generation. As JBS noted in 1923, Thevery mention of the future suggests him;46 indeed, later in life, he wouldcredit Wells as the inspiration for his own writing career.47 So pervasive washis influence that most contemporaries assumed there was no need to mentionit; as Olaf Stapledon remarked in 1931, A man does not record his debt tothe air he breathes in common with everyone else.48

In the case of Haldanes The Last Judgment, however, the influence wasmore than atmospheric: six particular works by Wells seem to have providedmuch of the essays essential framework.

The broad outline was clearly inspired by the earliest and most widelyread of Wellss scientific romances, The Time Machine (1895). Its unnamednarrator travels to 802,701 A.D. in order to observe the scientific marvels andsocial advancement he expects to find. Instead, he discovers that the humanrace has evolved into two degenerate species the Eloi and the Morlocks. Atthe end of the story, the time traveler voyages to an even more distant future,only to discover a dying planet with no trace of humanity or intelligence, acold earth sitting motionless beneath a pale, red, dying sun. The distant future,further human evolution, the bifurcation of the species, the danger of humandegeneration, the prospects of extinction, the dying sun all would reappearin Haldanes essay.49

The mechanism of the earths destruction was almost certainly inspired byone of Wellss most popular and beautifully crafted short stories, The Star(1897), in which a giant cosmic body passes near the earth, causing cata-clysmic tidal waves and earthquakes that almost wipe out human civilization.

45 The literature on Wells is vast. Of special pertinence to the present discussion are hisexperimental autobiography, Wells, 1934; Bergonzi, 1961; Williamson, 1973; McConnell,1981. Most of his early romances are collected in Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells(New York: Dover, n.d.); for a replica of the first magazine editions of some of these works,together with original illustrations, see Wells, 1978.

46 Haldane, 1924, p. 9.47 Dronamraju, 1995, p. 10.48 Olaf Stapledon to H. G. Wells, 16 October 1931; reprinted in full in Crossley, 1994,

pp. 197198.49 In The Causes of Evolution (Haldane, 1932a, p. 166), Haldane establishes the connection

himself. Referring to The Time Machine and The Last Judgment, he writes: Wells (1895)and I (1927d) have given less alluring accounts, both involving a bifurcation of the humanspecies into two, each of which loses certain qualities which we admire in contemporary man.


The story ends with the perspective of a Martian astronomer observing theEarths trauma from a distance; to him, there appears to be no effect whatever,aside from a small diminution in the polar icecaps which only shows,concludes the tale, how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem,at a distance of a few million miles.50 From this story, then, came not onlythe means of the earths destruction, but also the narrative device of havingthat destruction viewed from another planet.

Another source for Haldanes ideas was Wellss widely read classic, TheWar of the Worlds (1898), which details the invasion of the earth by scien-tifically advanced and utterly alien Martians, who must abandon their dyingplanet. After driving the inferior humans close to extinction, the Martiansthemselves are wiped out by tiny bacteria to which humans have becomeimmune. Other Martian ships, however, have apparently tried landings onVenus. The novel concludes with a vision:

If the Martians can reach Venus, there is no reason to suppose that thething is impossible for men, and when the slow cooling of the sun makesthis earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the threadof life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sisterplanet within its toils.

Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of lifespreading slowly from this little seed-bed of the solar system throughoutthe inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. Itmay be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only areprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.51

Wellss vision clearly presages Haldanes own; for JBS, however, it is wewho become those Martians, seeking to escape from our own dying world.

The form Venusian humanity takes in Haldanes essay has roots in anotherof Wellss romances, First Men in the Moon (1901), which depicts anadvanced, harmonious, stable, utopian Selenite society in the form of anintelligent, eugenically bred lunar insect hive. (The same motif is containedin his subsequent short story, The Empire of the Ants.52) Haldane suggeststhe connection at the end of The Last Judgment, when he admits that hehas depicted a human race on Venus as mere components of a monstrous

50The Star was first published in 1897 and subsequently appeared in a volume of

collected stories (Wells, 1899). It was based on La Fin du Monde (1893) by astronomerCamille Flammarion (18421925).

51 Wells, 1897; see Seven Science Fiction Novels, pp. 45253.52 Wells, 1905b.

472 MARK B. ADAMS

ant-heap.53 This is clearly a source for his ideas about humanity becoming asuper-organism in which the individual counts for little or nothing.54

Even Haldanes political ideas have clear Wellsian roots. Beginningwith his influential non-fictional book, A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells hadargued for a worldwide, monolingual, cooperative society run by a techno-cratic elite called the Samurai. Wells continued to pursue this technocraticvision throughout his career, most notably in Men Like Gods (1923) and inThe Shape of Things To Come (1933),55 and launched a thirty-year campaignfor global government to be brought about through a peaceful world-widerevolution. Of course, futurological or not, such Wellsian ideas are indeedpolitical and socialist, but they are not simply so: in the view of Wells(and Haldane) such technocratic socialism is seen not as a final human endstate, but as a necessary, emergent, relatively brief phase in a much longerevolutionary process.

This is brought home by Wellss most widely read and influential effortduring the 1920s, The Outline of History (1920), comprising two volumessubdivided into nine books. This was a history like no other: Its accountof the human past begins with the origin of the universe, the condensationof the solar system, the geological history of the earth, the evolution of life,and the rise and extinction of the dinosaurs. Humans first appear in BookII; history dawns in Book III; and Book IX deals entirely with the future.That final book, The Next Stage in History, consists of only one chapter,entitled Mans Coming of Age: The Probable Struggle for the Unificationof the World into One Community of Knowledge and Will. It concludeswith a paragraph labeled The Stages Beyond? sketching the coming controlof life, culminating in an almost religious invocation: Gathered together atlast under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe, unified,disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom and with knowledgeas yet beyond dreaming, Life, for ever dying to be born afresh, for everyoung and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool,and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.56 For Wells (as for Haldane), then,the unification of humanity was not a way of creating social justice or makingpeople happy: it was a necessary first step towards our destiny as masters ofthe universe.

53 Haldane, 1927d, p. 310.54 As we shall see, another source may well have been Ernst Haeckels Riddle of the

Universe (1900), which he read as a schoolboy at Eton.55 On the basis of this latter work, Wells prepared the scenario (published separately in

1935) for the film classic of the 1930s, Things to Come. The story embodies the emergence ofhis technocratic utopia in a fictional form (Wells, 1935).

56 Wells, 1920, p. 595.


The writings of H. G. Wells, then, provided the evolutionary, futurolog-ical time-scale and context for Haldanes essay but Haldanes vision isprofoundly different from that of H. G. Wells in critical ways. In The TimeMachine, humankind is powerless to stop its own bifurcation, degeneration,and extinction; not so in The Last Judgment. In The Star, a cosmic bodyalmost causes the end of a helpless human civilization; for Haldane, the earthis destroyed, but that is not the end, for humanity is not helpless. In War of theWorlds, it is not humans but bacteria that defeat the invaders; Wells suggeststhat no matter how advanced our own science becomes, we too might bejust as easily exterminated nor would the technocratic world governmentsenvisioned in A Modern Utopia or The Outline of History be able to do muchto save us from any such threats. For Haldane, by contrast, humans are largelyin control, reshaping planets and themselves in order to survive.

There is a fundamental difference between Wells and Haldane, then, andit has to do with science. For Wells, the most glorious fruits of the century ofprogress its discovery of astronomical, physical, biological and social laws meant that progress itself was constrained, humans were subject to inexor-able natural laws beyond their control, and powerless to shape our individualor collective destiny. Of course, as a onetime student of T. H. Huxley, Wellsknew his biology (indeed, in 1893 he had written two biology texts) butthe biology he knew was the Darwinism of the 1880s. Although Wells usedbiological themes often in his scientific romances, then, it was to express with a clarity that few others could match the classic fin de sicle Darwiniandilemma: if our emergence and progress as a species depended on the survivalof the fittest in the struggle for existence, then the amenities of our moderncivilization (including the survival and reproduction of the less fit) couldnot be indefinitely maintained we would either have to progress throughfurther struggle, or degenerate. For many, indeed, it seemed less a dilemmathan a cul-de-sac: the very qualities that marked our advanced condition (e.g.,health, welfare, equality and altruism) would destroy that civilization in shortorder; and, since natural laws and natural selection were inexorable, therewas no way to avoid it.

For Haldane, this was the old biology but he and his generation hadgrown up with the triumphs and promise of a new, experimental biologypredicated on manipulating organic nature to suit human ends.57 For its prac-titioners and devotees, the first decades of this century were heady timesindeed, promising human betterment along many fronts, including monkeygland therapy to improve virility, rejuvenation research to extend the humanlifespan, and powerful attacks on the infections that plagued mankind. Thesedecades saw the emergence of whole new research fields devoted to blood

57 For a readable treatment of the emergence of experimental biology, see Allen, 1975.

474 MARK B. ADAMS

transfusion, tissue cultures and organ transplants. Mendelian genetics wasalready leading to the improvement of agricultural breeds and the develop-ment of hybrid corn and other new crops. Similarly, by studying the effectsof electricity, magnetism, gravity, chemicals, temperature, and other control-lable parameters on the developing embryo, the new embryology held forththe promise that the organism might be understood, controlled and evenmolded from conception.58

Just before the Great War, the branch of this new biology that seemed tooffer the most immediate promise for controlling nature and saving humanityfrom extinction was, of course, eugenics. Its founder was Charles Darwinscousin, Francis Galton (18221911), whose multiple contributions to thenew science also included biometrics, statistics, and influential work inpsychology and criminology. In 1885, he had coined the term eugenics literally, being well born for the study and practice of improving thebiological quality of future human generations by decreasing the reproductionof the physically, mentally, or morally defective (negative eugenics), andincreasing the reproduction of the hereditarily gifted (positive eugenics).59In a way, eugenics was Galtons own answer to the fin de sicle dilemmahis cousins theory had posed; if humans were animals, and animals couldbe shaped by the breeder, the same techniques could be applied to human-kind. Such eugenic ideas were pervasive during Haldanes youth: they werewidely discussed, not only in scientific and popular periodicals, but also inthe famous plays of the Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw.60 By the endof the Great War, eugenics movements had blossomed in more than thirtycountries, and in a number of them notably Britain and the United States eugenics was taught alongside genetics as one of the most exciting andsocially relevant examples of the new biology.61

The new biology, then, came in many forms and JBS was familiar withmost of them. He learned much science from his father, the noted physiologistJ. S. Haldane, spending his childhood free time and vacations from schoolassisting him in the lab. In 1901, at age nine, he was taken by his father toan Oxford talk reporting on the recent rediscovery of Mendels laws. Whileat Eton, JBS was entranced by Ernst Haeckels Riddle of the Universe, whichsought to supplant Christianity with a scientistic philosophy (Monism) basedon evolution. Later he also read lie Metchnikoffs The Nature of Man, whichadvocated increased human longevity by the use of yogurt.62 He also knew

58 See, for example, Pauly, 1987.59 On Galton, in addition to other cited works, see Cowan 1972a, 1972b, and 1977.60 Shaw, 1982, for example; see also Kevles, 1985.61 On international eugenics, see Adams, 1990b.62 On his boyhood reading, see Clark, 1968, p. 24; Haeckel, 1900; Metchnikoff, 1908.


the classics of genetics, followed the progress of Mendelism, and beganhis own genetic experiments on guinea pigs in 1908, at age sixteen, whicheventually established genetic linkage in animals (quite independently of theMorgan group).63 By the 1910s Haldane was thoroughly acquainted withphysiology, genetics, biochemistry and the new biology in all its manifoldincarnations. By the mid 1920s, of course, he himself had become one of itsleading figures.

It was this difference between the old science and the new that was at thevery core of Daedalus. Near the beginning, Haldane makes the importantpoint that [Wells] is a generation behind the time. . . . Now . . . I believe thecenter of scientific interest lies in biology.64 Emerging from the heroic ageof invention, Wells had imagined the world transformed by the engineer andhis machines; now, not the engineer but the biologist is the most romanticfigure on earth at the present day.65 That, indeed, is what Daedalus is allabout: the way in which the myriad possibilities offered by the new biologyfundamentally transform prospects for the human future. For his part, H. G.Wells recognized how different Haldanes vision was from his own: appar-ently stung by Haldanes criticism, in 1925 he resolved to write a book aboutmodern biology. Well aware of his own ignorance of the subject, however, heuncharacteristically solicited the aid of two coauthors his zoologist son, G.P. (Gip), and Julian Huxley (Haldanes former schoolmate at Eton), whoended up doing most of the writing; as Huxley notes in his memoirs, by thenWells had forgotten much of his biology and what biology he rememberedwas by now old-fashioned pre-Mendelian.66 The work appeared in 1930 asThe Science of Life, and its final sections (which were being drafted in 1927when The Last Judgment appeared) showed that essays influence.67

Daedalus, then, began the job of updating Wellsian futurology with theimplications of the new science, a mission Haldane would complete in theessays twin and sequel, The Last Judgment. The two essays are alike inmany striking ways. Both include references to legend and myth, as well asquotations in Latin (untranslated) and other languages (French, Greek andNorse). Both confront religion, setting it in opposition to the world as under-stood by science, most especially the new biology. The length of the twoessays is roughly the same, as is their structure: each begins with a substantial

63 Clarke, 1968, pp. 2930.64 Haldane, 1924, p. 10.65 Haldane, 1924, pp. 77, 80.66 J. Huxley, 1970, pp. 155156.67 Wells, Huxley, and Wells, 1930, pp. 14541480. See also Huxleys memoir, which

devotes a whole chapter to the undertaking, and reprints letters between Wells and himselfconcerning disagreements over the content of that final section, entitled The Breeding ofMankind (Huxley, 1970, pp. 166170).

476 MARK B. ADAMS

discussion, then breaks into a message from the future (in single quotationmarks), and concludes by driving home the lessons of that futurology inthe present tense, ending with a poem.68

The key distinction between the two essays, however, is telling: Thefuturological account in Daedalus is from 150 years into our future, anddetails how the decline of humanity was forestalled by the universal applica-tion of eugenic ectogenesis. The futurological account in The Last Judg-ment is from 40,000,000 years into our future, and details how we havesurvived the end of our planet and risen to a higher form of consciousnessthrough controlled human evolution. Taken together, then, the two provide alook at the short- and long-term future of humanity and a complete answerto the fin de sicle Darwinian dilemma Wells had so effectively expressed.

Haldanes answer was essentially this: Traditional religion is untenable.We live in a material, Darwinian world, governed by the laws of science,and we must understand our existence and our future in an evolutionary,cosmic time-scale. Humanity is at a crucial moment in its history as a species,with only a few centuries remaining for us to seize control of our destiny:left to natural law, humanity will degenerate and, like all other biologicalspecies, eventually became extinct; our planet (and later our sun) will die.But the new biology affords us a way out: In the short-term, we can halt ourdegeneration through some form of negative eugenics, social experimenta-tion, world government and technocratic socialism. In the long term, usingpositive eugenics and bioengineering, we can create new kinds of humans formoving into space and colonizing other planets, within and, if possible,beyond our solar system. In this way, human progress can proceed formany eons, producing future descendants with even higher (perhaps tele-pathic or communal) forms of mentality. This is the science-based faith thatwill provide what Christianity and other religions cannot: scientific answersto the profound questions of ethics, human destiny, our place in the universeand the meaning of life. To realize our true destiny, we must be guided not bya myth from our past, but by a vision of our future.69

Haldanes answer, then, took the form of a new myth of human destinyto replace the old, a vision of a possible human future informed by the newbiology. Although articulated in the 1920s in Daedalus and especially TheLast Judgment, this vision and its elements would resurface and reappear,with minor variations, in many of his subsequent works. It was a kind of credo

68The Last Judgment contains roughly 75% of the words in Daedalus, but much of the

difference in length arises from Haldanes more confident, self-assured writing style in 1927;the futurological message in The Last Judgment, however, is considerably longer than thatin the earlier essay.

69 In Last Judgment, Haldane warns that humanity almost goes extinct because of its habitof looking to the past rather than being influenced by an envisaged future (pp. 300301).


and he held to it, I believe, throughout his life. I am not suggesting that thiscredo functioned dogmatically or mechanistically that he consulted it,that it directed him, or that it determined specific scientific research heundertook or particular political choices he made. Rather, I think it functionedas a vision, a worldview, almost religiously infusing and informing hismultifarious activities.

Understanding JBS

Haldanes credo provides the key, I believe, to understanding his biographyand career as a coherent whole, helping us to see through his apparent contra-dictions and vacillations to the underlying unity in his multiple careers asscientist, popularizer, and political activist.

What kind of a scientist was Haldane? In an autobiographical noterecorded in early 1964, he characterized himself as very much of a dabbler,adding: But I am not ashamed of being a dabbler. It sometimes comes invery useful.70 L. C. Dunn characterized him as a spreader (as opposedto a concentrator), noting that science needs both.71 As Ronald Clark hasobserved, The uniqueness of Haldanes contribution to science was thatfor much of his life he was able to bring to fresh fields the equipment andconcepts he had acquired in other disciplines; for him the cross-fertilisationof ideas really worked.72 An especially illuminating comment came fromJohn Maynard Smith, who worked with Haldane for ten years: He was nothimself a good observer and he was a terrifyingly bad experimenter buthe read avidly and he listened to what people told him, and he had a knack ofdrawing conclusions which the observer himself had missed.73

This helps us to understand the exceptional quality of Haldanes essays. Itis a mistake, I think, to dismiss them simply as popularizations, as is oftendone; in Possible Worlds, for instance, which discusses the likely epistem-ology of intelligent barnacles, what science precisely is he supposed to bepopularizing? Very few of his essays simply acquaint the layman with whatsome scientist or other already knows perfectly well; to the contrary, mostmake unexpected connections which can startle and inform novice and expertalike which is why, no doubt, scientists seemed to find them so suggestive.Lest objection be made that it is a mistake to attach such importance tosentiments expressed in mere popularizations, then, we should realize thatHaldanes popular essays constitute a major part of his intellectual legacy,

70 Haldane, 1973, pp. 214215.71 Dronamraju, 1985, p. 68.72 Clark, 1972, p. 23.73 Smith, Introduction, in Haldane, 1968, pp. ix.

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the fullest record of his thinking, and the place where his originality andspecial genius is most clearly manifest. We should recall, for example, that hisabiding contribution to the scientific study of the origin of life was not a bookor a stream of work, but simply an essay The Origin of Life publishedin the Rationalist Annual in 1929.74 Alongside that essay, in the same 1932volume where it was reprinted, are two others that reprise his credo: ThePossibilities of Human Evolution, and Mans Destiny.75

Haldanes credo, in turn, helps us to understand the multiplicity of hiscontributions to science. When we reconsider both their nature and diversity genetics, biochemistry, biochemical genetics, human physiology, mathe-matical population genetics, the origin of life, and so forth we come torealize that they all relate to his vision: these are precisely the scientific fieldswhose development is required by the project of controlling future evolutionand human destiny as he has conceived it. Indeed, in the 1920s, as he wasproducing his credo, he was also deeply engaged in the scientific task forwhich he would be most remembered, one that is central to any attempt atcontrolling human evolution: establishing the mathematics of evolution itself.The importance of his vision allows us to understand why a professionalbiochemist would have been inspired to undertake such a task.

Haldane often spoke against excessive specialization, and he abided by hisown warnings; such a fragmentation of science, he believed, would make itimpossible to realize its social implications, to see clearly and build soundly a way to the future. In one essay highlighting the central importance to ourfuture of sciences of both psychology and politics, he asks: Why then am Inot a psychologist?, answering his own question, I do not think psychologyis yet a science.76 Had he regarded it as such, one suspects, we would haveto add psychology to the already daunting list of fields to which he made acontribution.

Indeed, not infrequently, Haldanes vision actually appears in his purelyscientific work. His zoology textbook, Animal Biology (1927), co-authoredwith Julian Huxley, for example, concludes: The one great differencebetween man and all other animals is that for them evolution must alwaysbe a blind force, of which they are quite unconscious; whereas man has, insome measure at least, the possibility of consciously controlling his evolutionaccording to his wishes. But that is where history, social science, and eugenics

74 The essay was republished three years later (Haldane, 1932e), and also more recently(Bernal, 1967, pp. 242249; Haldane, 1968, pp. 112).

75 Haldane, 1932c and 1932d.76 Haldane, 1927b, p. 189.


begin, and where zoology must leave off.77 Similar references can be foundin his other scientific works.

An especially telling example is Haldanes influential scientific classic,The Causes of Evolution (1932), long recognized by evolutionists and histor-ians of biology alike as one of the first statements of the emerging evolu-tionary synthesis. What has been overlooked, however, is the books sixthand final chapter, where Haldane explains what he sees as the broader signifi-cance of his own work.78 There, after reprising the evolutionary history ofman, he turns to the future: Now for the first time the possibility has arisenof mind taking charge of the process [of human evolution], things are morehopeful. We certainly do not know enough at present to guide our own evolu-tion, but we have only been accumulating the knowledge necessary for suchguidance during a single generation. There is at least a hope that the nextfew thousand years the speed of evolution may be vastly increased, and itsmethods made less brutal.79 In succeeding pages he discusses the variousfictional portrayals of the human future by Wells, Shaw and others, whichhe largely rejects because of their incompatibility with modern biology. Hepraises only one work: If anyone desires a speculative, but not (in the light ofour present knowledge) wildly impossible, account of mans future, I advisethem to read Last and First Men 80 not mentioning that this 1930 workby Olaf Stapledon was inspired, structured and informed by his own essay,The Last Judgment, to which he makes but modest allusion. Nor was thislink between his population genetics and his vision a sometime thing: evenat the 1947 meeting that helped to orchestrate and finalize the evolutionarysynthesis, Haldane returned to the themes of his credo in his featured publicaddress, Human Evolution: Past and Future.81

77 Haldane and Huxley, 1927, p. 335.78 The final chapters of other important contemporary sources, alas, have also been over-

looked: the last third of Paul Kammerers The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (1924),which argues for a Lamarckian, socialist eugenics; and the last third of R. A. FishersThe Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), which argues for a eugenics based onMendelian genetics. In all three works, I would suggest, those final sections are critical forunderstanding why these influential works were written and what they are about.

79 Haldane, 1932a, p. 164.80 Haldane, 1932a, p. 166.81 Haldane, 1949. The essay was reprinted as the concluding essay in Haldane, 1951,

pp. 271288. In that volumes preface, Haldane writes: The last essay in the book wasdelivered, as an evening discourse, at a Conference on Genetics, Paleontology, and Evolutionheld at Princeton University as part of the commemoration of its bicentenary. I should havepreferred to have spoken on a more specialized and less speculative topic. But I am sensible ofthe honour done to me in asking me to speak to a wider audience than that of our more strictlyscientific meetings (p. 5).

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Against this background, Haldanes contradictions and shifting posi-tions with regard to eugenics seem more apparent than real. He was nevermuch of an advocate of standard eugenics movements, and scorned advocatesof eugenic sterilization (whom he derisively termed the off-with-your-cockbrigade);82 rather, as Paul, Kevles, and others have rightly emphasized, hewas always a reform eugenicist. Whether current genetic knowledge orsocial conditions were sufficient to make a truly successful eugenic programpossible was for him, of course, a question of timing, politics and the state ofknowledge. One senses in some of the secondary literature on Haldane a well-meaning attempt to somehow exonerate him from his eugenic commitment,which is treated as a passing infatuation that his own work largely discredited as if the science he did that led to his skepticism was simply coincidental.But why did he do eugenics-relevant work in the first place, if not to accu-mulate the knowledge necessary to control human evolution in a way thatwould work? And, rather than wishful thinking, of course it had to be basedon reliable genetics and good biology what else could it be based on? I thinkone can easily make too much of his criticisms of contemporary eugenics byoverlooking the vast time frame in which Haldane thought, mistaking hiswithering attacks on ill-founded nostrums and Nazi race biology for oppos-ition to eugenics as a goal. Concerning the central question that, in thefuture, when the necessary sciences were sufficiently developed, humankindmust use genetic, eugenic, and other measures to improve human biology andcontrol human evolution he remained true to his ideal throughout his life.83

Haldanes vision also helps us to understand his politics. It is well knownthat, in the 1930s, Haldane turned from a quasi-Fabian socialist into a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party. This fact is often treated asyet another peculiarity of Haldanes personal evolution, without any connec-tion to his scientific life but, surely, it had very much to do with his scientificlife. As we have already noted, it is easy to mistake a variant of Wellssfuturology for socialism, Marxism or communism. For Haldane, both hisscience and his politics flowed from his deeper visionary orientation toward

82 Smith, 1987, p. 7.83 In his introduction, Dronamraju (1995, pp. 1314) takes exception to my published

assertion (Adams, 1990b, p. 220) that The Soviet A. S. Serebrovsky, the American H. J.Muller, and the Briton J. B. S. Haldane . . . exhibited a lifelong commitment to eugenic ideals.The word ideals was carefully chosen, however, and is not contradicted by the instancesof Haldanes caution which he correctly cites. He goes on to assert that it is quite easy tomake too much of Haldanes writings on eugenics because he was a prolific writer on a greatnumber of topics and was given to a great deal of biological speculation and eugenics wasa part of that process, noting that his pronouncements on eugenic improvement were almostalways biology based. Although I think his dismissal of speculation is misleading, much ofwhat he says, I am happy to note, actually reinforces the argument I am presenting here.


the human future. And revolutionary Russia appeared to many, at least poten-tially, to be that future in the making: a new society devoted not only torational, scientific planning, but also to human experimentation on a grandscale.

By the mid-1920s, Haldane is already writing about the Soviet Union inthese terms. In Science and Politics he laments that the latter is not yetthe former, commenting: I, for one, shall continue to regard any politicalprojects as interesting experiments which may or may not promote humanhappiness but will certainly furnish important data for future use. . . . Untilpolitics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and socialreforms as experiments.84 He goes on to advocate experimental politicsas the way to speed up human evolutionary progress a thousandfold. In hisother essays of the period, his references to the U.S.S.R. are always framedby this scientistic, experimentalist, futuristic perspective. For example, in yetanother essay in Possible Worlds, The Duty of Doubt, the nature of hisinterest in the Soviet Union is explicitly declared: The government of theSoviet Union not only admits but boasts that its policy is experimental. . . . Nodoubt the Russian people has proved an ideal subject for large-scale experi-ments. . . . Our present rulers and those who support them will be well advisedexplicitly to imitate the extremely capable Bolshevik leaders, and adopt anexperimental method.85 Things have to be tried to see how they work, he issaying, and mistakes are inevitable; the important thing is to reject traditionand outmoded ideas, doubt everything, be experimental and support science.Note that, some twenty years later, these very same themes would emerge inHaldanes defense of Lysenko; reading his various comments about Sovietscience and Lysenko over the years, one senses a continuing willingnessto overlook obvious shortcomings in the name of challenging orthodoxy,experimenting with human society, and attempting to transform nature.86

Haldanes credo, then, was an informing vision that begins to make senseof his various political activities a vision that was antecedent to those activ-ities, and continued after them. In particular, it helps us to understand why,in the 1920s, he might well have seen the Soviet experiment as interesting;why, as the 1930s unfolded, he might have regarded scientific communismin Russia as the best hope; and why he left the Party in 1950, when it becameclear that the Soviet Union had the wrong attitude and the wrong biology! to lead the way to the future he had envisioned. Did JBS share H. J. Mullershope, in the mid-1930s, that Stalin would turn from engineering human

84 Haldane, 1927b, pp. 188189.85 Haldane, 1927c, pp. 220221.86 See Paul, 1983a; Krementsov, 1996.

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society to engineering human biology?87 When Haldane threw himself intothe British Communist Party and its mission a few years later, did he fancyhimself an early prototype of the technocratic Samurai of Wellss ModernUtopia? In the mid 1950s, when the character of Stalinist biology had becomeclear and the radical prospects for Britain were dimmed by the Cold War, didHaldane relocate to newly independent India because he sensed there anothergrand social experiment in the making?88 The possibilities are suggestive.

Finally, Haldanes credo also helps us understand the religious dimensionsof his life. The term may seem inappropriate for someone of his consistentlyatheistic persuasion. As commentators have sometimes noted, however, for alifelong non-believer he seemed inordinately preoccupied with religion. Wehave already noted the attention devoted to it in both Daedalus and TheLast Judgment, but religion is a major theme in many of his other essays,written throughout his life. This preoccupation, when noticed, has generallybeen accounted for by Haldanes First in the Greats at Oxford, his defenseof Darwinism against creationists, his Marxist agenda, or his showing off.But I believe that the omnipresent religious motif in his work can be bestunderstood in relation to his credo.

We have already noted that Haldanes credo constituted a new, future-oriented myth of human destiny intended to replace the old religions. ThatHaldane was advancing a new religion was a fact not lost on the orthodox.In 1931, Arnold Lunn wrote to Haldane: It has always seemed to me a pitythat the Christians and anti-Christians so seldom engage in battle on the sameground. You inform the listening world through the medium of the B.B.C. thatthe creeds are full of obsolete science and that Christianity is dead. . . . You, Isuppose, believe that your creed if generally adopted would increase the sumtotal of human happiness. . . . Are you . . . in the least interested in convertingthe world to your point of view? If so, Lunn proposed, Haldane shouldcollaborate in a book to consist in a series of informal letters in which youwould defend your creed and attack mine and in which I should defend mineand attack yours. Despite his busy schedule, Haldane accepted the challenge.The result was a lengthy, lively give-and-take, published in 1935 as a 412-page book entitled Science and Superstition.89 The review of the volume in

87 On Mullers eutelegenesis, his time in the Soviet Union, and his letter to Stalin urgingimplementation of his ideas, see Adams, 1990c, pp. 152216, and especially pp. 192197.

88 In his writings throughout his life, Haldane made frequent references to Hindu mythologyand practice. In Daedalus, for example (Haldane, 1924, pp. 47, 90), he argues for an ethicas fluid as Hindu mythology. Beginning in the late 1940s, he begins to emphasize that theeugenic and biological techniques he advocates, although opposed by Christian moralists, areperfectly compatible with Hinduism, and, indeed, that some of these practices are alreadystandard among certain Indian peoples.

89 Lunn and Haldane, 1935.


Nature judged that, although a clever controversialist, [Lunn] is not in thereligious sphere the equivalent of Professor Haldane in the science sphere.90

The same could not be said, however, of C. S. Lewis (18981963) fantasy writer, Christian moralist and fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.Lewis had grown up on Wellss stories and liked the whole interplanetaryidea as a mythology, but Haldanes updating of that tradition in The LastJudgment was another matter entirely. With its hope of perpetuating andimproving the human race, Lewis understood that his scientific hope ofdefeating death is a real rival to Christianity, and resolved to do somethingabout it. The result was the Perelandra Trilogy (19351945), three novels(set sequentially on Mars, Venus, and Earth) in which Haldane is carica-tured in the satanically possessed Weston, a physicist who repeatedly mouthsthe selfsame religion expressed in what Lewis later termed the brilliant,though to my mind depraved, paper called The Last Judgment. 91 Whenthe trilogy was completed in 1946, Haldane reviewed all three novels in astinging essay entitled Auld Hornie, F.R.S., which took Lewis to task forputative inaccuracies, the complete mischaracterization of science, and hisdisparagement of the human race, and extended his critique in yet anotheressay, Anti-Lewisite.92 (Lewis wrote a detailed rebuttal and put it away in afolder marked Anti-Haldane; it was published posthumously under a moresuitable title.)93

In one sense, however, Lewis (and Lunn before him) had gotten it exactlyright: although not a Christian, JBS was a deeply religious man. He had acreed: his faith was reason, his church science. For all his criticism ofRevelations, he had been blessed with one of his own his 1927 vision and it informed his life. In various writings, he expressed admiration for thetranscendence and self-sacrifice of the Christian saints, and his own behaviorconsistently reflected the same commitment in his indifference to his ownscientific priority, his defense of the meek against the powerful, his devo-tion to social and political causes, and his evangelical popularizations, notto mention his lifelong willingness to conduct dangerous experiments onhimself for the greater good. Throughout his career, he sought to advancethe faith, abstaining from criticizing those he regarded, rightly or wrongly, asmembers of the congregation (whether Vavilov or Lysenko), and resisting thetemptation, despite considerable pressure from his colleagues, to participate

90 Clark, 1968, p. 111.91 Green and Hooper, 1974, pp. 163164; Lewis, 1966, p. 66.92 Haldane, 1946a; reprinted in Haldane, 1951, pp. 249258. (The title means Satan,

Fellow of the Royal Society, that is, Haldane himself as depicted by Lewis.) See also hisMore Anti-Lewisite, in Haldane, 1951, pp. 259267.

93A Reply to Professor Haldane, in Lewis, 1966, pp. 7485.

484 MARK B. ADAMS

in internecine schisms. Rather, he worked with energy, steadfastness, anddedication whether in science, writing or politics to advance the faithand spread the gospel. In serving his revelation and his faith, JBS indeedled a profoundly religious life. As one former student has noted, Life withHaldane required, among other skills, that one brush up ones mythology,because he regarded myth as the best form of moral instruction.94

The Final Years

The developments in postwar science occasioned minor adjustments toHaldanes vision, but by and large they reinforced it. This fact helps us tounderstand the ways in which he began to part company from fellow left-ists and scientists alike; Haldane welcomed the atomic bomb as a scientifictriumph that afforded new power to shape our destiny, but he realized thatatomic war might complicate the realization of the future he had envisioned.Nonetheless, as the person who had first estimated the mutation rate in man(in 1931), Haldane disagreed with many of his fellow human geneticists, suchas H. J. Muller, over the question of whether testing and nuclear war woulddestroy the human gene pool and lead to human extinction; thinking in longevolutionary terms, he tended to doubt it, and criticized as alarmist the anti-nuclear activities of the likes of Stapledon and Russell, as well as the spate ofcontemporary science fiction warnings of atomic monsters and mutants.

Of even more interest to him was mans unexpected leap into space,signaled in 1957 by the launching of Sputnik. The Last Judgment had envi-sioned this taking place, with great difficulty and much loss of life, only some9,000,000 years hence but it was occurring in his own lifetime. If the atomicage was complicating the realization of his vision, then, the space age wasgreatly accelerating it and so too were the DNA discoveries and the adventof molecular biology, developments which he (as a geneticist, biochemist andbiochemical geneticist) found much less surprising. His credo had pictured adistant human future characterized by the control of life and the move intospace; in the 1950s, both were already beginning to happen.

There was yet another development in the postwar period in whichHaldane took considerable interest: science fiction. The modern reader mightbe tempted to regard Daedalus and The Last Judgment themselves asscience fiction, but when Haldane wrote them the genre have not yet evenbeen given its name; not until the so-called golden age (19391942) didit assume its modern form.95 In a sense, then, as several commentators have

94 Smith, 1987, p. 8. For a suggestive article on the religious context of Haldanesevolutionary work, see McOuat and Winsor (1995).

95 The term science fiction was first coined (by Hugo Gernsback) in 1929 (Moskowitz,1963, pp. 313333) two years after Haldanes The Last Judgment was published.


noted, Haldane can be regarded as one of the founding masters of modernscience fiction, purely on the basis on his essay, The Last Judgment.96

Much of the science fiction Haldane read in the 1950s must have seemedremarkably familiar; by then, the ideas he had expressed some thirty yearsearlier had become so pervasive in SF as to constitute major motifs of thegenre. His idea of ectogenesis had stimulated Aldous Huxleys Brave NewWorld (1932), and through it had resurfaced in a host of other works, notablyRobert Heinleins Beyond This Horizon (1942), which explicitly critiquedmany of Haldanes ideas while incorporating others.97 His vision of a longfuture history for humankind throughout the galaxy had become a basic motifof the genre, thanks to golden-age classics by both Robert Heinlein and IsaacAsimov. The collective mind of the Venusian humans in Haldanes essaybecame the prototype for A. E. van Vogts Slan (1940) and many other SFstories by Frank Herbert and other authors. His idea of altering planets tomake them habitable by humans was called terraforming by Jack William-son in a series of stories published in 1942 and 1943 and became the basisfor many other works, by many authors, during the following decades.98Finally, in a series of stories beginning in 1952, James Blish coined the termpantropy for Haldanes idea of biologically engineering humans to fit otherplanets, and it quickly became a standard SF motif. In his autobiography,Haldane remarked: The greatest compliment made to me today, I believe,is when people refer to something which I discovered . . . as a fact the wholeworld knows . . . without mentioning me at all. To have got into the tradi-tion of science in that way is to me more pleasing than to be speciallymentioned.99 If so, his science fiction reading must have utterly delightedhim. From what we can gather, Haldane was critical of much of what he read,particularly works in which he thought the science was wrong or misleading;but he must have been surprised and delighted to see how thoroughly hisvision had spread. And it is hardly surprising that Arthur C. Clarke washis favorite author: as a youth, Clarke had been transformed by his reading

96 In particular, both Olaf Stapledon and C. S. Lewis so listed him, and highlighted theimportance of the essay, in their respective surveys of the genre in 1947 and 1955 (e.g. OnScience Fiction, Lewis, 1966, pp. 5974).

97 It appeared as a magazine serial under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald (Heinlein,1942), but under the authors real name when it appeared, in revised form, as a book one ofthe earliest novels of golden age American science fiction to appear in hardcover (Heinlein,1948).

98 Indeed, the most renowned SF series of recent years Kim Stanley Robinsons Red Mars(1993), Blue Mars (1994), and Green Mars (1996) is simply a detailed fictional account ofthe forthcoming terraforming of Mars. Each of the three novels of the trilogy won either theNebula or the Hugo Award as the best novel of the year in which it appeared a clean sweepunprecedented in the history of the prizes.

99 Haldane, 1973, p. 217.

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of Olaf Stapledons Last and First Men, and many of his subsequent writ-ings, whether stories, novels, or popular science, are infused with Haldanesvision.100

Following his move to India in 1957, Haldane remained an avid sciencefiction reader and befriended Arthur C. Clarke, who had emigrated to SriLanka in 1956.101 Many years before, in 1932, Haldane had written a sciencefiction story, The Gold-Makers, remarking at that time that he was takingthe opportunity of publishing, since it is rather unlikely that I shall ever writeenough fiction to fill a volume.102 Yet that was apparently one of his prin-cipal preoccupations during his final years: writing a novel. The unfinishedwork, published posthumously in 1976 with a foreword by his sister, NaomiMitchison, was indeed, as she describes it, rather more than straight sciencefiction, a work in which he lets his imagination go. Ranging over spaceflight, alien civilizations, love, mentality, mathematics, linguistics, philos-ophy and cats, the work expanded upon his vision, knitting together themultifarious themes of his earlier essays into a sort of contemplative cosmiccomedy. This is not the place to analyze a 220-page book. Suffice it to saythat, in many ways, the work was vintage JBS: powerful, sometimes clumsy,sometimes difficult, Mitchison notes, but the product of a man who hadthe sort of mind which ranged over everything and usually illuminated andclarified it.103 And, characteristically, in keeping with his lifelong vision, thenovel was a meditation on the ultimate meaning of the human adventure inthe context of biology, evolutionary time, and cosmic space.

Right up until his death in 1964, Haldanes faith in his vision appar-ently remained undiminished. The most striking proof is an extraordinaryessay he presented in London in 1963, one of the last major papers hewrote. Entitled Biological Possibilities for the Human Species In the NextTen Thousand Years, this essay reprises his earlier credo, this time in thecontext of the atomic age and the space age.104 Considering the aftermath

100 See Clarke, 1968, pp. 243248. The influence of Haldanes ideas is evident not only inmuch of Clarkes science fiction, but also in his non-fictional futurology (e.g., Clarke, 1963,especially the final chapter).101 An Indian student who worked with him in these years recalls that he was a vora-cious reader of science fiction by many authors but especially of Arthur C. Clarke, JohnWyndham and Olaf Stapledon, and relates that on one occasion he mildly protested againstthe sensational writings of H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and John Wyndham which he charac-terised as obstructional to the clear thinking of any serious discussion on the future of man(Dronamraju, 1985, p. 144).102 Haldane, 1932b, p. v. The story was first published as Haldane, 1932f; reprinted inConklin, 1962, pp. 125143.103 Haldane, 1976, pp. 34.104 Haldane, 1963, pp. 337361.


of a possible nuclear war, he doubts that mankind will be exterminated, andcriticizes imaginative writers with a superficial knowledge of biology, suchas Aldous Huxley and John Wyndham, who have written of mutations of newtypes for doing considerable disservice to clear thinking. While regardinga possible tyrant world state that might emerge from that war as sinister,he remarks: A few centuries of Stalinism or technocracy might be a cheapprice to pay for the unification of mankind. Assuming that our descend-ants will be free from atomic war and famine, he then asks key questionswhich his paper will seek to address, and all have to do with his vision:What evolutionary trends may be expected for humanity in the absence ofconscious control?, What evolutionary trends may be expected if evolutionis consciously controlled?, and finally how far must the answers to thesequestions be modified for human beings living on other planets, satellites,asteroids, or artificial vehicles?

As his 1963 discussion unfolds, the themes of the early days reappear: hementions Metchnikoffs ideas; he remarks that as soon as the genetic basis ofhuman physiological diversity is understood, large-scale negative eugenicswill become possible; he cites the work of Penrose, and alludes to the ideasof H. J. Muller pointing out that many of the ideas that are unacceptable inChristian countries are perfectly compatible with the Hindu faith. Soon, heis considering what forms of pantropy or human physiology will be neces-sary for the first spaceship crews to the stars. He returns to the theme of thehuman forms necessary for living on the outer planets, where he proposessomeone shortlegged or quadrupedal: I would back an achondroplasicagainst a normal man on Jupiter. He envisions a human-inhabited Mars, thencontemplates dangerous experiments on the brain to explore higher forms ofmentality. By the end of the essay, he worries about the real prospect ofour species dividing into two or more branches, either through specializationfor life on different stars or for the development of different human capa-cities. It is back to the Elois and the Morlocks all over again, with his owninterplanetary twist.105

The 1963 essay concludes: I have sketched my own utopia, or as somereaders may think, my own private hell. My excuse must be that the descrip-tion of utopias has influenced the course of history.106 In truth, however, itwas not a utopia he had sketched: it was his credo, updated for the spaceage the same vision that had infused all the diverse activities of a life that105 This discussion ec

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